Couples who dated for three or more years before getting engaged had roughly half the divorce hazard of couples who got engaged within a year of dating, according to a study published in the journal Economic Inquiry by economists Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo Mialon. That sounds, at first glance, like exactly the evidence behind the familiar warning against rushing to the altar. Look closer at what the researchers actually measured, though, and the popular version of that warning starts to fall apart — because what predicted stability wasn’t the length of the engagement itself. It was something else entirely.
What the Most-Cited Research Actually Measured
Francis-Tan and Mialon’s analysis, drawn from a survey of more than 3,000 ever-married U.S. adults, tracked how long couples dated before getting engaged — not how long they stayed engaged before the wedding — and matched that against divorce hazard ratios over time. Couples who dated one to two years before proposing had a hazard ratio of 0.788 relative to those who got engaged in under a year; couples who dated three-plus years before proposing dropped to 0.518, meaning roughly half the relative risk. That’s a real, meaningful pattern. But notice what it’s a pattern of: the runway of getting to know someone before anyone popped the question, not the runway between the proposal and the “I do.” Those are two different clocks, and most popular advice about engagement length quietly conflates them.
The Complication: It’s Not Engagement Length, It’s Deliberation
This is where the “long engagements are safer” warning gets genuinely complicated. If the protective factor were simply time — more months between proposal and wedding, full stop — you’d expect a straightforward linear relationship: longer is always better. That’s not really what the underlying research supports. Relationship researchers Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades, whose work includes a study in the Journal of Family Psychology on how couples move through major relationship transitions, argue that what actually predicts outcomes is whether a couple made each transition — dating exclusively, moving in together, getting engaged — through a deliberate decision rather than drifting into it by default. A couple who spent two deliberate years dating, thought hard about the decision to propose, and then had a six-month engagement is, by that framework, in a very different position than a couple who spent two aimless years “sort of” together and then got engaged because it felt like the obvious next move, even with a longer engagement afterward. Calendar time alone doesn’t capture that difference. It’s a reasonable proxy, but it’s a proxy, not the mechanism.
Why the Simple Warning Persists Anyway
The reason “don’t rush the engagement” endures as advice is that rushing often does correlate with the thing that actually matters: less time to have made a deliberate, clear-eyed decision. A whirlwind proposal after a few months of dating frequently means a couple genuinely hasn’t had the runway to stress-test compatibility on money, family, conflict style, or life goals — the stuff Francis-Tan and Mialon’s dating-length findings were really picking up. But that’s a correlation between “short overall timeline” and “less deliberation,” not proof that a longer engagement, tacked onto an already well-established relationship, adds meaningful protection on its own. A couple who has already dated for four years and knows exactly what they’re getting into doesn’t obviously become safer by turning a six-month engagement into an eighteen-month one. The urgency isn’t really about the wedding date. It’s about whether the decision to get there was made on purpose.
What This Means for Couples Planning a Timeline
None of this is an argument for rushing into an engagement, or for treating a fast timeline as automatically fine. It’s an argument for being precise about what the research is actually protective of. The data points toward deliberateness — real conversations, real clarity, real time spent actually getting to know each other before a proposal — mattering more than whatever number of months separates the ring from the ceremony. A couple stretching out their engagement mainly to satisfy an external rule of thumb, without using that extra time for anything in particular, isn’t obviously buying themselves more security. A couple who used their dating years well and enters a shorter engagement with genuine clarity may be starting from firmer ground than the calendar alone would suggest.
The honest takeaway isn’t a new rule to replace the old one — it’s that no single number of months was ever going to be the thing doing the protective work in the first place.
